About the Project

Claire the principal of Detail Marketing Communications was very clear what she wanted from her website: clean, simple and unfussy. White space was used to de-clutter the page and present information that would appeal to a wide user base as detail has clients on a local, national and international level.

Client

Claire McGowan

Launch Site

www.detail.com.au

Here’s some page headings that I’ve been working on. We’re using quite a strong grid for some pages so hence the less structured hand drawn style for the headings. I’ve done about ten of these so far. My plans for the long weekend of the Queen’s visit? More drawing.

South & Central Freo

Off the beaten track & Wray

I’m in the middle looking like a deranged leprechaun. Why is it when photographers tell you to do something you just do it. A friend of ours was behind the photographer gyrating and thrusting. Laughing in photos is never really a good look.

Anyway if you read the article you’ll find out more about the book. Mr. Martin sums it up very well.

Just an afterthought, is it normal to use sentence case in a headline?

My entry was in the Western Region* Culture & Events category, for designing a website for the Perth based choreographer Alice Lee Holland. You can find out more about the project here. The awards ceremony was a strange mix of computer geek and designer chic the former being the dominant party. High point: getting my awards (obviously). Low point: realising I might have to give a speech.

*Apparently the Western Region covers WA, the Northern Territory and South Australia. So yeah that’s a bit odd, maybe they want a whole east coast versus west thing going on.

Temporally propped up on the bookshelf until I can get the hammer and nails out.

This all would have been circa the year 2000, and 3D modeling was just gaining popularity. Plenty of places still wanted the real deal, like tourist centres and museums.

This is a model of An Earagail in County Donegal. The process for building this was pretty straightforward. We were handed a map and that was it. Then it was: cut out the base, mould the topography from fibreglass, hand paint the mountains, flock the grass and varnish the ocean. My lasting memory of this is slicing the top of my finger off and blood gushing through those miniature valleys.

An Earagail aprox. 1.5m x 2.5m

Building this one of Dublin Castle was a bit of a pain. You can see from the second photo that it was built on a slanted base and had a forced perspective towards the right. It was a bit of an odd one. Periodically my boss would wander by and rip off whole walls and battlements declaring that they were all wrong.

Dublin Castle 0.75m x 1.5m

There was a photo shoot after every model was finished and “the sky”  was hauled in from storage and propped up in the background. You can see a bit of the workshop peeping through in the image below. I worked on some of the detailing in the Dublin Quays project. This involved painting clothes on tiny 10mm people that you see walking around. Not a bad way to pass an afternoon: painting outfits with a 000 brush. It’s kind of weird 18 months later walking past life-size versions of what you made.

Dublin Quay

This model of Westport was nearing completion when I started at the workshop. I made houses, flocked the grass and stuck in tress. It turned out to be quite useful having a birds-eye-view of the town in my mind’s eye. A good friend of mine from university moved there and I visited her a lot. I was able to navigate around the place when we fell out of a pub. It was like having a mental Google map long before they existed.

Westport Co. Mayo 2m x 2m

Overall this was a great job. I loved the hands-on nature of it and the tangible results. I interviewed for another job and almost ended up working in another workshop that specialized in making new limbs for amputees. It was at this point in time that I decided to go back to university and study Computing and Design. Now all my time is spent creating for the screen, the opposite end of the spectrum really.

Yohfest

YOH Fest is Western Australia’s biggest youth performing arts event.

Launch Site www.yohfest.com.au

Dampier Highway

The Dampier Highway Duplication is a State and Federal Government funded project designed to improve the safety of the highway and create essential infrastructure in the Pilbara.

Launch Site www.dampierhighway.com.au

Darkstar Coffee

Darkstar Coffee is a local brand from Northbridge, comprised of high-grown Arabica coffees sourced from around the world.

Launch Site www.darkstarcoffee.com.au

Ishar Women’s Multicultural Centre

Ishar encourages the health and wellbeing of women of all ages and from all cultural backgrounds.

Launch Site www.ishar.org.au

Duende

Duende is a tapas and wine bar in Leederville. I worked with the super-talented Brook Bobridge on this one.

Launch Site www.duende.com.au

About the Project

Dance is all about movement and this is expressed though the way the user navigates through the site and layout of the images and textures. Using either navigation option allows the user to experience movement through the site which is a key part of choreography and dance.

Although there are eight separate sections to the site the design of each page flows from one to the next giving a seamless flow. This accommodates varying screen resolutions: as the screen widens content from the next page reveals itself. The site expands to fit what ever size the browser is set to with a minimum width of 960px.  The user can also swipe through the pages on an iPad or iPhone.

The site also features full screen galleries that showcase Alice’s work.

Client

Alice Lee Holland

Launch Site

www.aliceleeholland.com.au

A screen grab of the entire site:

This horse looks like it just stepped out of a salon.
 

About the Project

A Woman’s Touch are a small, friendly and creative photography studio based in Perth. The design featured large beautiful photographs and variations of their aperture flower logo was used to tie different sections of the site together. It was a great project to work on and I’m really happy with the outcome. The site features seven full screen galleries a shop and a blog and the entire site is content managed.

Client

A Woman’s Touch Photography

Launch Site

www.awomanstouchphotography.com.au

Robots, Edward Gorey, cooking, anthropomorphism, sewing, surf, snow, fireworks, Emma Hill for Mulberry, cocktails, lip-balm, Polaroids, monsters, sci-fi, Heston Blumenthal, tea lots of tea… all blends, Saul Bass, limes, black holes, new things, old things, Sir John Tenniel & cheese. Oh and triangles, I just love triangles.

Dōmo arigatō, Mr. Roboto

You can find me on:

Twitter

Pinterest

Linked in

I’m also socially active outside the virtual world as a committee member of AGDA (Australian Graphic Design Association).

• 2 weeks ago
• moments ago
• 5 days ago

Their rise in popularity is probably due to their use on Twitter and FaceBook. I’m starting to favour them now as it’s a nice change from the standard date format of 12.35pm 24/04/2011 or 24th of April 2011.

This is something that I really wanted to try on this site and it took me a while to figure it out. I didn’t even know relative dates were called relative dates. I also tried the few plugins available but the date outputted was completely inaccurate. Anyway I thought I’d share what worked for me since I spent some time getting it right.

I found instructions via this blog post but I had to make a few modifications to make it work.

Add this code to your functions.php file, it

<?php
    if(!function_exists('how_long_ago')){
        function how_long_ago($timestamp){
            $difference = time() - $timestamp;

            if($difference >= 60*60*24*365){        // if more than a year ago
                $int = intval($difference / (60*60*24*365));
                $s = ($int > 1) ? 's' : '';
                $r = $int . ' year' . $s . ' ago';
            } elseif($difference >= 60*60*24*7*5){  // if more than five weeks ago
                $int = intval($difference / (60*60*24*30));
                $s = ($int > 1) ? 's' : '';
                $r = $int . ' month' . $s . ' ago';
            } elseif($difference >= 60*60*24*7){        // if more than a week ago
                $int = intval($difference / (60*60*24*7));
                $s = ($int > 1) ? 's' : '';
                $r = $int . ' week' . $s . ' ago';
            } elseif($difference >= 60*60*24){      // if more than a day ago
                $int = intval($difference / (60*60*24));
                $s = ($int > 1) ? 's' : '';
                $r = $int . ' day' . $s . ' ago';
            } elseif($difference >= 60*60){         // if more than an hour ago
                $int = intval($difference / (60*60));
                $s = ($int > 1) ? 's' : '';
                $r = $int . ' hour' . $s . ' ago';
            } elseif($difference >= 60){            // if more than a minute ago
                $int = intval($difference / (60));
                $s = ($int > 1) ? 's' : '';
                $r = $int . ' minute' . $s . ' ago';
            } else {                                // if less than a minute ago
                $r = 'moments ago';
            }

            return $r;
        }
    }
?>

Then go to your index.php (or wherever) file and instead of using the standard:

<?php the_time(get_option('date_format')); ?>

add this to where you want the date to be:

 <? if(!function_exists('how_long_ago')){the_time('F jS, Y'); } else { echo how_

long_ago(get_the_time('U')); } ?> 

and this for the date in the comments template:

<? if(!function_exists('how_long_ago')){the_time('F jS, Y'); } else { echo how_

long_ago(get_comment_time('U')); } ?>

I had to add one final fix to functions.php to make it work for me. WordPress needed this to understand my timezone:

date_default_timezone_set('Australia/Perth');

About the Project

Designing for a global audience can be difficult. Not every user has access to a fast internet connection needless to say this can be restrictive but it can also lead to a wonderfully simple site that any user can enjoy.

Client

STATT Consulting

Launch Site

www.stattconsulting.com

About the Project

There were three elements to this project: proposal document, presentation and 3D fly-through animation and illustrations.

Client

Baker Hughes

Why are they worried about who Debbie is bringing to the prom? Damn straight flying saucers are fur real.

Now I’d like to talk a little about my inspiration for my badge… lasers, because lasers are cool especially when they’re coming out of a space-lion’s eyes. Triangles need a mention as well triangles are definitely my favourite shape.

Here’s a picture of the real deal.

Welcome to Werkshop Design Co. Werkshop is a web & design company run by Orla Larkin and based in Fremantle, Western Australia.

I specialise in creative in front-end design and online brand implementation, which means I make good looking websites that function well.

Bona fide.

Things that are important to me: usability and accessibility, functional does not have to mean boring. I use XHML, CSS, JavaScript to bring websites to life. Web design is also about visual presentation. I create designs that will connect with your audience through a combination of colour, layout and typography to effectively communicate the purpose of your site.

I also work at Media on Mars as a Web Creative.

This site is a custom design powered by WordPress and built using XHTML, CSS 2.1. It leverages jQuery Masonry using a base column width of 315px. PT Sans is the font you’re reading right now.

About the Project

Castlebrook have been designing luxury hotel and apartment interiors since 1982 with projects across Europe the Middle East and Africa. It was exciting to work with such a well established international company.

Client

Castlebrook Furniture + Design

Launch Site

www.castlebrook.ie

Two days later (drying time between coats) later I had exactly what I wanted.

About the Project

Werkshop likes grids and this is what we used to create an online portfolio for a range of post cards and prints.

Client

Love Freo

Launch Site

www.lovefreo.com

Sea Rescue asked for a site that promoted their main activities: membership and volunteering. A fresh look was really important to them as they wanted to highlight that they are a friendly 24 hour service available to every boat user in need of help, from flat battery to emergency assistance.

www.searescue.com.au

About the Project

I teamed up with Blueface to redesign their website and present them as the friendly face of telecommunications in Ireland. Blueface provide Internet telephony services to Irish and international markets and their service is delivered via a custom engineered VoIP platform. They needed an outgoing site that presented a lot of information in an easily digestible format.

Client

Blueface VoIP

Launch Site

www.blueface.ie

About the Project

The Greens wanted to communicate to the 18-35 demographic that they were about much more than environmental issues, that their policies cover many other areas. We chose some issues that would appeal to a youth audience.

Client

The Greens